Hillary Clinton Says “No”

“No,” “No,” “No,” “No”: those were Hillary Clinton’s full answers to four questions from Wolf Blitzer. He had asked, “If the president is reelected, do you want to serve a second term as secretary of state?” And then, after the first no, if she’d like to be Secretary of Defense, Vice-President, or President of the United States. (How about a ballerina, a firefighter, or an astronaut?) She had a longer response when he asked her why not, though it wasn’t very responsive—it was mostly about how much fun it had been to be Secretary of State. And though she said, after a followup, that she was “moving on” from thoughts of the Presidency, she also used the slightly avoidant “no intention or any idea even of running again.” And where would she get an idea like that?

There was another, questionable no from Clinton today, this one concerning the case of Raymond Davis. “The United States did not pay any compensation,” Clinton said, according to Reuters. Well, but someone did: about two million three hundred thousand dollars to the families of two men Davis shot and killed on the streets of Lahore in what he claimed was self defense, and a third who was killed when a car Davis called for from our consulate slammed through traffic. (I’ve written about Davis, and about the Times’s strange explanation of its decision not to report on his connections to the C.I.A.) Maybe Clinton’s denial is a matter of verb tenses—“did not pay,” as opposed to “is not paying.” (“We expect to receive a bill,” an American official told the Washington Post.) Our government had been trying to assert diplomatic immunity on Davis’s behalf, enraging many people in Pakistan. Pakistani law allows judges to issue a pardon, however, if the family of a victim attests that it has received compensation, and is satisfied. (The provision has its basis in Sharia law; Eric Lach, at TPM, found some irony there.) That is what happened today. Davis is free, Pakistan put its judicial machinery through some formal motions, and it never got to the point where the Pakistani courts had to make a call on the diplomatic-immunity question. But you can’t really call it elegant. There were protests in Lahore when the news came out, and it leaves untouched the larger questions of impunity and covert operations in Pakistan. There are also questions about the pressure the families had on them to settle. A lawyer who had been representing them said that he was held in a room at the courthouse for a number of hours and not allowed to talk to them while the deal was being struck. One of the relatives who won’t be sharing the money is the eighteen-year-old widow of one of the dead men; she is dead, too, now, after killing herself by swallowing rat poison. Was there justice for her? Maybe Hillary Clinton has an answer.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.